Read
the captions by hovering over the images, and click on them to
see them enlarged.

St John
the Baptist, Alderford

There are low hills to the north of
the Fakenham road, and I had often wondered what it would
be like to explore them. In Norfolk, you never need to
get far away from a busy road to immerse yourself in
lattices of narrow lanes, and moreover these hills
appeared well wooded. On a map, there wasn't much out
there. Tiny villages, but famous names for church
explorers: Salle, and Cawston, and Booton. The summer before
last I had begun to explore them. I was dying to go back.

Some
of the villages barely exist. One of the churches
I'd already been to was Little
Witchingham. The tiny church there,
just to the north of Alderford, is one of
Norfolk's best kept secrets. In the heat of that
June, the narrow lanes overshadowed by hedges
still overgrown with late Spring fecundity, it
was like being in a lost land. Coming back in
winter, the trees were bare. And yet there was
still something secretive, something elusive
about these places on the way to nowhere in
particular, a rambling landscape hazed by copses
and punctuated by church towers.

Alderford
is also tiny. It has always been tiny. In the
1851 census, when the population of rural Norfolk
was at its peak, there were barely sixty people
living here. Today, there are perhaps half that.
And yet, St John the Baptist survives as a
working church, thanks to the sensible grouping
of parishes together under one Benefice. St John
the Baptist is in the friendly, welcoming Wensum
group, and this is much to its fortune.

It is also
an open church in summer, accessible with a nearby key in
winter, and thus preserves a sense of continuity in the
heart of its parish that locked churches lose.

It is a
narrow church, in a narrow hamlet. But even on this cold
February day there was something lovely about it, and as
I approached the sun came out for the first time that
day, a day that had started in a blizzard. The tower is
slender, perhaps too austere to be beautiful. Probably
14th century in origin, it is now heavily buttressed, and
the top is rather curious, with 'Gothick' pinnacles,
probably evidence of late 18th or early 19th century
work. The church seems to have been given a bit of a
makeover at this time, the pretty porch still with its
wooden sundial reading Redeem the Time.

As
I say, this is a narrow church; but it was once
wider. The north wall has the remains of an
arcade set into it, and so there was once a north
aisle. All other trace of this has gone, but it
explains the setting of St John the Baptist's
most famous feature, because as you go in you are
confronted with one of England's 40-odd Seven
Sacrament fonts. It is a good one, with lots of
original colour - not as artistically dramatic as
its near neighbour, the font at Great
Witchingham, but homely, with rustic
character.

The curiosity of it is
that, in this narrow setting, it is placed
dramatically at the top of two high pedestals,
with its northern face barely 30cm from the north
wall. And yet, it appears to be in its original
setting. The steps are older than the font
itself. Clearly, when the church was wider, it
would have appeared centrally placed. But the
piece of wall against which it stands was part of
the arcade, and so it has always been this close
to the wall.

This is
interesting, because we know that, before the late Middle
Ages, many fonts were placed against walls or against the
pillars of arcades. This font is quite late - a bequest
in the 1520s seems to point to its installation, and it
must therefore have replaced an earlier font on the same
double pedestal.

What was
the earlier font like? There's no way of telling, but
seven sacrament fonts were part of a wider late-Medieval
project to reinforce Catholic orthodoxy in the face of
local abuses and superstitions. Many Norman fonts feature
pagan imagery, and some of them - I think particularly of
the fonts at Burnham Deepdale and Castle Rising - have a side
which is clear of detail, showing that this was the side
against the wall. Some of these fonts survive, but the
vast majority must have been replaced in the late 14th,
15th and early 16th centuries.

There
are only seven Catholic sacraments, and late
medieval fonts have eight sides, and so why was
the panel on the north side here not left blank?
Simply, I think this is evidence that Seven
Sacrament fonts were bought 'off the shelf' from
stonemasons, and were not carved in situ or
necessarily tailored to suit the setting. The
Alderford churchwardens bought their font and did
the best with it that they could.

The
Alderford font has low reliefs, and is not
particularly badly vandalised; ordinarily at the
Reformation, faces were chopped off before the
font was plastered over, and that seems to have
been done in a perfunctory way here. The angels
below the bowl are particularly rich, in a
cornucopia of detail. Twenty years later, this
would become the full flowering of the English
Renaissance on the Seven Sacrament font at Walsoken; but then
the Reformation snuffed that Renaissance out, at
least as far as churches are concerned.

Anti-clockwise from the east, the panels
here are Baptism, the Priest holding the baby and flanked
by two acolytes, one holding a taper and the other a
chrism chest with the holy oils, the parents standing in
front; Crucifixion (NE), the odd-panel-out, but here
perhaps the best panel, almost unvandalised, and John and
Mary at the foot of the cross retaining colour in the
drapery of their clothes; Last Rites (N), an unusually
successful rendition of the dying man's bed, which always
gave medieval masons problems, and the acolyte holding
the chrism chest is here too; Matrimony (NW), the Priest,
flanked by two acolytes, wrapping his stole around the
hands of the happy couple, who have interestingly been
completely effaced from the shoulders up; Ordination (W),
the Bishop ordaining three Deacons, which is unusual;
Confession (SW), another excellent panel, the Priest
seated in a canopied chair, and angel protecting the
confessee while a devil slinks away; Mass (S), the
celebrant with his back to the viewer, the acolyte on one
side holding a taper while the other rings a bell which
swings wildly; and Confirmation (SE), less crowded than
is usual in Norfolk, with just two candidates and those
ubiquitous acolytes flanking the Priest behind.

Images of all of these are below; hover to
read captions and click on them to see them enlarged. I
have corrected the perspective of the image of Last Rites
to show it as if the arcade was not there.

The shaft
of the font has little niches with Saints in, again in
good condition and battered more by the hands of time
than of iconoclasm. They appear to be eight Apostles; St
Andrew is clearly identifiable, for example. However, one
appears to wear a crown, and may be intended as Henry VI,
whose cult was reaching a peak at this time. Another,
which has been identified as St James from the staff in
his hand and the books, appears to wear a woman's head
dress - could the staff be a crozier, making this St
Etheldreda?

The western side of the
double pedestal is widened and raised slightly,
to make a platform for the Priest. If you stand
on it, you are raised quite dramatically above
the benches to the east. Selwyn Tillett, the kind
incumbent of this lovely group of parishes, tells
me that baptising babies in this font would be a
fairly hazardous operation if you didn't have a
sense of balance and a firm pair of hands.

The rest of the church is plain,
simple, and pleasing. the rood loft stairway
remains as a dramatic punctuation along the south
wall. The altar is striking, and its reredos
appears to contain some old woodwork, perhaps
from a rood screen. Did it come from here
originally? Something that certainly did can be
seen as you leave. This is the door handle boss
in the middle of the ancient door. Both of them
have been here longer than the font, perhaps as
long as the church itself. Now, there's
continuity for you.